Blogger Waves Bye to Beta

What's with all of the hush-hush pushes out of beta, these days? First there was last week's non-announcement of Skype's move to 3.0, and now there's Blogger's oh, yeah guys, we're not in beta anymore--'beta,' crossed out with a Photoshop...

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

What's with all of the hush-hush pushes out of beta, these days? First there was last week's non-announcement of Skype's move to 3.0, and now there's Blogger's oh, yeah guys, we're not in beta anymore--'beta,' crossed out with a Photoshop paintbrush tool, and the words 'We're out of beta' to its right in small font atop the Blogger home page. Why, when Appscout left beta, we required all Ziff Davis staff members to get the compass logo tattooed on the small of their backs, and paid to have the children of Canada spell out our URL in candles, across the country, so that extraterrestrials and blimp operators would never again be without important pieces of software news. You'd think someone like Blogger's parent company, Google, which requires its apps to sport around the word 'Beta' like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the snow-capped hills of Hades, would take equally evasive action. But no, we got no press releases, gift baskets, carrier pidgeons, or singing telegrams. Merely a minor work of Photoshop, and a post to Google's own Google Blog.

According to a few unhappy and vocal folks over at Blogger's help page, the transformation has been anything but smooth. CNET's Google Blog asked Google what was going on, and got a similar response to ours. Ours reads:

The team has been working very hard to ensure a smooth migration to the new and improved Blogger. We know how important Blogger is to our users! We encourage anyone who is having technical difficulty to visit the Blogger Help Center and join the Blogger Help Group to ask questions and find answers (help.blogger.com).

So, I guess the answer seems to be, keep plugging away at the help page, and maybe you'll catch some programmers' attention before they start carving their Christmas ham, and then blog the crap out of your frustrations. Until then, feel free to use our comments board to vent any transition-related frustration.

Brian Heater has worked at a number of tech pubs, including Engadget, Laptop, and PCMag (where he served as Senior Editor). Most recently, he was as the Managing Editor of TechTimes.com. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.
More »